EXPRESS: High Tech, Not Low Touch: Empowering the B2B Sales Force through Online Channel Integration
研究B2B企业引入在线渠道后，客户整合该渠道如何影响销售人员与客户的关系，发现客户在线渠道整合使季度毛利率提升7%，但面对面销售交易仅减少9%，且提升了互动质量。
As many B2B companies are transforming their sales processes by adding online channels to the sales force, it is critical to better understand how salespeople respond, adapt, and manage relationships after customers adopt them. Leveraging data from a large B2B firm, we investigate how customers’ integration of an online channel affects salesperson-customer relationships. We find that customer online channel integration leads to a 7% increase in quarterly customer gross margins, with 28% of a customer's sales volume shifting online, but only a 9% reduction in face-to-face sales transactions relative to that of before the online channel integration. Salespeople continue to hold a substantial number of face-to-face meetings to handle transactions and engage in other activities with customers that integrate the online channel than expected, given the proportion of sales volume that those customers shift online. Relatedly, customer integration of the online channel enhances the quality of salesperson-customer interaction within those relationships, reducing products sold at a loss and increasing the breadth of product categories sold. We also identify important contingency factors regarding online channel integration, including that its effectiveness when use is highly synchronized with face-to-face sales transaction meetings can further drive customer gross margins by about 16%.